Freelance Your Way to Freedom

13Vetting Virtual Assistants

If you're serious about changing your life, you'll find a way. If you're not, you'll find an excuse.

— Jen Sincero

Virtual assistants (VAs) are still largely underutilized in the world of online business today. I will admit, I didn't fully realize their power or potential when I finally agreed to hire two from the Philippines. I figured they could do some hashtag research for me, sort an email here and there, and maybe keep some documents organized. I was completely underestimating what specialized VAs could be doing in my business.

As Karan Kanwar wrote, the next‐generation virtual assistants will be far sexier than Alexa and Siri (Kanwar 2020). He posits that VAs, since they are still humans at the end of the day, will be able to smartly select software tools for automation in businesses, while still having that critical thinking power that's missing in a robot like Siri. VAs take the best automated elements of an Alexa, and they make it human.

Plenty of studies have predicted that by 2025, 50% of knowledge workers will use VAs daily, growing from only 2% in 2019 (Afshar 2021). That's a big jump in a short amount of time.

VAs have proven their worth to me repeatedly. They can come specialized in the specific service you offer or possess helpful skills like certifications in Google Analytics and other search engine optimization (SEO) requirements. VAs can come with a background in copyediting or be able to log into the back end of your website ...